Opportunity is the Enemy (of Startup Success)

Does this sound familiar?

You’ve had an idea, you’ve been talking to people about it who think it’s great, you may have even gotten people to pay you for it! 

The more time you spend thinking and talking about this idea, the more opportunities you start seeing to build this into something world-changing — another problem you can solve, another feature you can add, another customer segment you can serve, another partner who can help. 

It’s incredible. It’s exciting! It also spells disaster.

You need an opportunity to bring something new to life that customers are willing to pay for. But that’s it. You can only say “yes” to one thing at a time. 

1,000 opportunities — 1,000 possibilities to solve problems and make money through your original idea — sounds like it would be 1,000x better than one opportunity.

It’s not.

Instead, those extra possibilities are 999 distractions keeping you from executing 1 good opportunity. 

Anecdotally, we all know this. We’ve all tried juggling too many things only to do none of them well.

We all have that one friend (or are that one friend) who’s been super excited about an idea. Then the next time you see them, they’re gung-ho on another idea. The next time you see them, they’re onto something else. 

As their friend, you can see that, despite all of their excitement, they’re changing constantly and accomplishing nothing. They aren’t sitting with anything long enough to make progress in that direction.

It’s a shame.

Yet we as entrepreneurs and marketers — and people in general — do this constantly. We’re the friend excitedly going nowhere.

Something in the nature of startups and entrepreneurship creates this pressure to constantly be doing more, to go bigger, to change the world. Yet the ones who actually do start with one opportunity.

They do one thing — solve one problem, make one thing easier, serve one specific type of customer. They say “no” to the other 999 opportunities so they can take advantage of the one.

Rather than the common startup mindset of maximalism (doing more, going bigger), you should strive to be an entrepreneurial minimalist.

What is the least you can do in order to provide a product or service that customers are willing to pay for?

Do that.

Related Reading: 

To be an entrepreneurial minimalist — to know what the least you can do to create value is — you have to know your target customer better than anyone. How they think, how they act, what they love, what they fear.

If you’re not there yet, interview 100 target customers to start learning. (If you’re not sure how to approach that, email [email protected] and we’ll chat about it.)

As you begin to understand your target customers better than anyone, you’ll learn the least (or simplest thing) you can do to add value.

That’s your one opportunity to pursue.

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Saying “no” to 999 opportunities doesn’t have to be a permanent commitment. In fact, it may be better to think about saying “maybe later.”

You shouldn’t consider other opportunities — other features, other channels, other partners, other markets — until you’ve delivered on the first, on the one problem you can solve best for this one type of customer.

You work that opportunity all the way through until you’ve found traction or a dead end. Then you look for the next minimalist opportunity. Repeat. One at a time, not all at once.

It may be helpful to keep a running doc of these opportunities and ideas that you can combine, filter, and rank later. That way you are at least putting a system around how you make decisions.

Note: This advice assumes you do not have to pivot in order to find traction. I’ll need to cover pivots and iterations in a separate post.

Chances are you’re pursuing multiple opportunities right now. Quit it. What you need more than anything is focus.

Discuss problems and why they exist with your customers.

Determine what’s most important and how you can solve it better than existing options.

Deliver that in a product or service they’re thrilled to pay for. 

Then you can worry about the next opportunity.

Hi, I’m Kenneth Burke. 👋 As a Marketing VP, I led our bootstrapped startup from $0 to $20M and an acquisition. Now I help startup founders achieve product-market fit, so you can remove the guesswork from growth.

I post stories, advice, and frameworks weekly here on #BurkeBits, and share content more often across LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. If that sounds interesting, subscribe, email me at [email protected] with your current challenge, and share this with another builder.